


"...but no rider ever flew two dragons"

by venus woman and giant saurian (grayglube)



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, F/M, Marriage of Three, Multi, OT3
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-30
Updated: 2017-09-30
Packaged: 2019-01-07 03:07:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,474
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12224487
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grayglube/pseuds/venus%20woman%20and%20giant%20saurian
Summary: It is only an endless study of self-abasement he might endure and call penance to sate the urge he has never been without to prolong his own discomfort and call it noble, to call it honorable.





	"...but no rider ever flew two dragons"

**Author's Note:**

  * For [delirante](https://archiveofourown.org/users/delirante/gifts).



> I hear there's a lot of drama in the pairing tags on tumblr and that Jon Snow still knows nothing. I know this: quit the beef dudes, keep it friendly, why get mad about another person's ship? 
> 
> Also, tiny book/book universe reference to the Kingmaker Criston Cole, not important to plot in this.

It is not an easy thing to learn the truth of some old tale she’d been sure she knew the right of.

 

_For every night he spent in Visenya’s bed he spent ten in Rhaenys’_

 

From first listen as a child, to a much regrettable age, she’d always thought the story had been a way of measuring what a woman might do to a man.

 

She’d thought it was a sorry thing to be a woman needing ten nights to prove her love when another needed only one.

 

With the end of a war and the start of some new dynasty in the south there’s pallid truth in all things, even her girlish misunderstandings.

 

For, Visenya never wanted Aegon, they say, not for the soothsame things Rhaenys had wanted of him. But, Visenya allowed him his one night after his ten spent in another’s bed all the same.

 

If that was not love it was duty.

 

Sansa knows duty.

 

Be it for family or honor or survival or the self-same pallid shadow of something like truth but far less than love. There is truth in resentment, and some measure of honor in spite.

 

Her brother comes to her bed and his name is Aegon too and she knows duty as a lover, the word is a shadow of some other woman’s truth.

 

* * *

 

 

She is not ungrateful, she is not greedy.

 

In winter they are all hungry, her own satiety coming neither from his night cloaked visitations once a fortnight, or the rarer twice, nor the quiet of her own keep, he gives voice to a desire that she wishes he might leave as a thought within his own head and not the whisper that falls through the dimness of her bedchamber.

 

There are places that no longer lend comfort once he speaks; Winterfell, his arms.

 

 _‘Open your eyes._ ’

 

* * *

  

_“Do not ask this of me.”_

_“Sansa, please-…”_

_There is more he might speak, stuck on his tongue, thick and heavy like a rime of frost._

_She looks away before he might begin to plead._

_“Oh,” she starts. “You are only here to inform, not ask,” she speaks to their shadows on the wall._

_“Sansa, I-…”_

_She continues her embroidery. “It is unseemly for a king to beg.”_

_“I am not a king, now.”_

_“But, you must be,” she mocks him. “I will refuse such a command otherwise.”_

_She knows she pains him, it is hard to find care for him now._

_He kneels upon the ground so she must look upon him. She wraps her needles on the folds of cloth and rises, looking down at him._

_“Get up, then. And, request my hand properly so I might not have cause to refuse.”_

_He does, her open hand itching under the scratch of his beard and heat of his mouth, she considers the urge to turn his cheek red with her palm but lets it go before she nods assent and sweeps from the room._

 

* * *

  

She is regent, not regnant and the cold moon tea tastes like the bitter dregs of some old dream belonging to a girl who used to play and live in different halls.

 

She’s already wept and wiped his seed from her thighs, waiting until he’d left.

 

It would not have done to look so disassembled in front of him on what has been their wedding night. Her third, his second.

 

She has no cause to keep crying over it.

 

* * *

 

 

There are no babes.

 

Her once-brother does not question her lack of fruitfulness.

 

Maester Wolkan is her creature as the errant Lord Tarly is Jon’s.

 

When she thinks of Lord Tarly who had gifted them all with such awful truths as true names, as much a kingmaker as Ser Criston Cole, sourness coils in her gut.

 

* * *

 

  

They are all well into their cups.

 

The South is some fatal dream, a land of wraiths with hot breath like the summer wind that exhales upon them from the open window.

 

They are bold together, her husband and his true Queen, a fine performance, but what they seek to entice from her remains unclear and obscured between their two strained bodies and the slick sound made as they come together above and below the motions of their union.

 

She sips from her cup and watches as they would have her watch, as if she needs instruction.

 

She is a Queen now too and no one might command her to do anything.

 

They pant and strive towards something they must think makes for some ribald song of lust tempered by fated paths.

 

They’re only fucking and anyone might do that, she wonders if she’s supposed to clap for them.

 

* * *

 

 

There is a beauty before her, star-bright and bold and she speaks her name and opens a hand towards her.

 

“Come, Sansa,” she says.

 

“I would be poor sport.”

 

“It’s not for sport,” Jon tells her and his near spitting of the word makes her bristle, he is unduly ungracious with his tone.

 

His other queen reclines, nude, lovely and unmarred, as well put in place as the stars in their curved raiment. Her hand settles on her once-brother’s arm.

 

“Unless you like to watch,” Daenerys says, softly smiling to hide the slyness of a secret grin.

 

“I find it all tedious,” it is truth enough.

 

There appears vague amusement at the quip upon the silver queen’s unpainted mouth, horror on her brother’s.

 

“Tedious?”

 

She explains so he might steady himself. “Endless variation upon the same theme.”

 

“Endless?” She is teased gently in return, the woman on the bed curling towards her, pressing knees and hands to the bed to arch closer.

 

“I was married once, for true,” Sansa tells her.

 

“As was I.”

 

She could scoff, she’s heard of Daenerys’ horse lord husband and she envies her past pains.

 

Her own dead husband scored her flesh to tally the nights.

 

“And the nights were very long the year I was wed.”

 

Her brother shivers in the warmth of spring, she takes her leave of them and their bedsport.

 

_…ten nights is Rhaenys’ bed._

She wishes it were more for she cannot stand the way he looks at her through the dark.

* * *

 

He wants her.

 

It is only an endless study of self-abasement he might endure and call penance to sate the urge he has never been without to prolong his own discomfort and call it noble, to call it _honorable_.

 

Regardless of how lowly it makes him feel to seek her bed without invitation he still peaks, he still looks upon her closed eyes and asks that she open them and look upon him.

 

She won’t, not even when he puts his mouth to her nightrail, suckling at her, the blush of each fine tipped breast pretty and delicate through the white shroud of her modesty. 

 

* * *

 

 

“Sansa.”

 

“…”

 

She does not want to be near either of them, but it is some old necessity to seem sisterly that has brought her to sit beside Daenerys.

 

“I have missed your quiet council,” Daenerys confides, her tone light, near honest even.

 

“Council?” she questions.

 

And, there is the brightness of a smile. “Your face, I can see all of what you would speak. Sometimes.”

 

It is, she thinks, an extension of the other’s open hand.

 

And then it is another’s open mouth pressed to hers, tasting sweetly of dornish red.

 

She remembers sweet games she played as a child in Winterfell with her friend Jeyne before she was lost in the city they all now keep to, she remembers the taste of wine in the Maidenvault, she remembers the smell of the rose garden and another beautiful girl who had dreams to be queen

 

* * *

 

 

“Don’t.”

 

He doesn’t startle but it’s a near thing, he has rarely heard her speak, the words spoken during their time together in her bed are easily accounted for and well-remembered for the sparsity of them.

 

He will ask if she is alright and she will answer some soft quiet word to belay the tension in him so he might simply go on and be done and leave her well enough alone for near half a moon’s turn.

 

Rarely is more required.

 

He is a careful man, if not always gentle then at least not trying to cause her pains.

 

His head has moved low, between her breasts and down the ladder of her ribs and his dark crown had seemed to roam with some distinct aim in mind and she’d pulled upon it harshly and opened her eyes and gifted him a single new word.

 

He frowns at her, hands upon her thighs, uncertain and ill at ease for she has always been abiding.

 

_You will enjoy this, wife._

 

She remembers words like small knives and looking down on a different man with broken hands and the eyes of some kicked dog and the grin upon a different man’s mouth while he’d watched.

 

It hadn’t been gentle bedsport, it had not been kind, and it had not been something she _enjoyed_ , but it was some kind of sport for a man no better than a beast.

 

She has not spoken of Ramsay Bolton since the winter turned to spring and she has thought even less of him but she might find his shade risen if she looked towards some dark corner of the room.

* * *

 

 

Hands unravel her grip upon the bed clothes and she is some empty thing, she’d forgotten winter and how long the nights were and Theon Greyjoy and Ramsay Bolton and the faces of flayed men in the yard, but the memory of it has made her stone or ice or a ghost.

 

A haunted body of some dead girl.

 

“Sansa?”

 

“I do not wish you to do that.”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

And, he is.

 

He begins again, tenderness in his hands, touching her softly, carefully, reaching inside to make ready her body for the brief time they might meet upon a marriage bed.

 

It is no small thing to be reminded of the dead and in the dark, where she has let him light only one candle, he is some other man, a monster in the half-light and she shakes in his arms and then she is weeping, heavily and wholly and he understands in part only how deeply she fears.

 

Her nails prick his arms and score them to the wrist and before she has done that much he has removed himself and pressed up so his flesh might no longer blanket hers with its sticky warmth.

 

It is harder to breathe than when she would wait in the dark when Winterfell was not her own and she thought him and all her kin dead.

 

She rolls from the bed and sits upon the floor and reaches for the tumble of furs to wrap around her pale limbs.

 

His legs hang from the bed, feet flat upon the stone and he bears his head in his hands above and beside where she steadies her mind, an entreaty in how he meets her upon the floor.

 

She does not press close to be comforted, there’s not comfort to be found.

 

She does not offer him words, she shakes silently and will not look at him.

 

* * *

 

 

He does not seek her bed again and three moons pass before she resolves to remind him of how deeply they have _all_ consigned themselves to duty.

 

He is a King and he might not simply act the fool man now.

 

It is Daenerys she speaks first to because he has sought in every way to avoid her presence.

 

“He is worried, I think,” she tells the silver queen.

 

“Of what?”

 

“Of being a brute or worse.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“I have seen some small part of what you both might share but it is not so easily done in my chambers.”

 

“You do not need to speak of this if you don’t wish it.”

 

“There are only,” she reaches for a word that might mean all of what she wishes to say, she finds only the barest close enough grasp. “…things, that he might not do, for my peace. He is gentle but I wonder if he does not want more of me.”

 

“More?”

 

“He wonders if he is pleasing, I think.”

 

“And, is he pleasing to you? In such a way that matters in your bed?”

 

“I do not wish him to have such concerns.

 

There is nothing that isn’t fouled by some dark turn of what he might wish to do to please her, to please himself by making her forget that she hates him, the true cause of her reticence lying somewhere between her spite and deep pains well remembered, always, of who came to her bed before him.

 

“Sometimes, there is an awful nothing where there was pain, when he lies with me I sometimes can scarcely feel him at all. So, it doesn’t matter, you see.”

 

She smiles but there is only quiet pity on the face of his other queen.

 

* * *

 

 

“I’m sorry if I gave you cause for alarm,” she tells him as he sits beside her in her private solar.

 

He only looks at his gloved hands.

 

He will be off to the training yard soon.

 

“I should not have assumed,” he says.

 

She rests her knife across the plate and reaches a careful hand to his, holds it there for just long enough that he might look to her as she rises.

 

“You are kind to me. It is only less necessary to try as you would with her, with me.”

 

He has taken her wrist in hand before she might be far enough from him. She looks down and he tries to smile but it’s only a wavering shadow of one. “We don’t have to be faceless in the dark, it does not have to be during the night or me above and you below.”

 

She looks at his hand and he opens it.

 

“What there is, is well enough.”

 

* * *

 

 

Daenerys and her once-brother are near enough to one mind sometimes that it’s more than simple irritation that flares brightly in her when either might speak, like she is the one who might need to be convinced of something.

 

“It need not only be him and I, or you and him,” the silver queen tells her before she comes closer.

 

And then, her lips are well-made edges of the world for a moment, it is softness upon softness upon lips and breasts the soft planes below ribs and back. A pillow of thighs and sweep of silver hair in whorls of her own across the rumpled bed where another’s scent lingers.

 

There is something to be felt, kindness maybe, something as simple.

 

The tenderness of a woman she might have liked to be herself, once.

 

She lies beside her sister-wife in a bed that smells of the man who is not between them.

 

* * *

 

 

She returns North before the news is announced.

 

A child will be born in the South from the womb of a woman who thought herself barren.

 

She wonders aloud what purpose she was meant to serve if her body had not been needed for heirs as she thought.

 

She accuses him of treacherous lust and refuses to unbar her door.

 

It is meant to hurt him, to send him far from her, to let her take leave of the South.

 

She misses her lonely, cold hall far more than she will miss whatever true tenderness she has taken from his bed.

 

He deserves neither her duplicity nor her crafting of lies into would-be truths, but she deserves her own peace, her own chosen life far from the heat of summer and dragons.

 

* * *

 

 

“Don’t rise.”

 

She walks across the steaming humus in boots and her nightrail, holding his furs around her thin shoulders.

 

Her knees sink into the damp earth around him and she raises the hem of her nightrail so he might see the red floss of her sex.

 

He touches his hand there and holds her boldly.

 

“Here?”

 

“Yes.”

 

He looks at the windows of the long halls above, the guesthouse and all that might look over them.

 

“We might be seen if we remain.”

 

She smiles lightly, pressing her mouth to his softly, breathing words across them.

 

“Bathe with me.” Her smile the haunt of a dead woman who’d been kissed by fire too, and then, it _is_ fire and it is a different woman yet again.

 

He wakes.

 

Sourly he rises.

 

* * *

 

 

It is not he that follows north first, it is his other queen delivered of a son, a hearty shriek against a black sky devoid of red stars or the coming of a new dawn, a son she thought she never would have felt grow inside of her, a son he pushed from his thoughts for a wanting too fierce for just such a thing.

 

Daenerys Targaryen understands this.

 

“I am sorry you feel we have stolen something from you, but the truth is there has never been a kinder pair to take from you. If you think me cruel of unjust then there will be nothing but us forever against the other, I do not wish such a thing and it would wound him to think he is to be shunned forever. He is not a proud man but he’s not without a long memory.”

 

“I will not come with you to Kings’ Landing,” she nearly spits at Daenerys Targaryen.

 

“I do not want you to come with me.”

 

Sansa, suddenly, understands what it is that goes unasked.

 

She turns to the window and peers below at where the snows have begun to melt. “I will not send him away if he comes.”

 

Daanerys holds herself by the fire. “I did not think it all pretend, Sansa.”

 

“It needn’t have been,” she admits.

 

The woman who is a Queen of many names and lands looks upon what she might have also had if not for her own callow heart. And, when Sansa looks, there might be sadness in the other woman’s stare, but there might be something more hateful too.

 

“He is your King,” Daenerys tells her.

 

“He is _a_ King. I am Queen of the North.”

 

“I will not play word games with you.”

 

Sansa can only shrug. “He is the King he was born to be and the husband you choose. He was only a command you expected my obeisance towards.”

 

“Why can you not be of joy?”

 

And it is just this that Sansa has wondered herself, for longer than she might remember the start of, she will not share such truths of self with anyone else.

 

“I will keep your peace, if that not enough? Must you both be loved by all?” she asks.

 

Her silver sister leaves and she is left standing in another room, alone, again.

 

* * *

 

Daenerys stays in Winterfell and watches the distance between them, walks into the space and puts herself between them, kindly so, so they might not murder the other with words.

 

* * *

 

Daenerys’ gown is damp with milk, her breasts heavy and sodden with milk.

 

It is easy to remove both their gowns and slowly slide legs together, to kiss mouths softer than a man’s, to find peace only because they are both so tired, when they are both so finished with what they have pretended would serve the realm best.

 

They are not meant to be three.

 

They are not even meant to be two in any way that might make a true pair, they are all disparate parts of some monstrous thing.

 

But, that is not now.

 

Daenerys lies upon sore breasts and watches the realms’ other queen arrange her mussed hair and dress again in a simple gown for sleep, but she does not come back to bed and she has never seemed to be at rest.

 

Her kiss and her hands and her body move perpetually and it’s a wonder her brother has let himself be cast from her bed at all.

 

He has arrived already but has been denied an audience.

 

“Would you like a bed-gown?” Sansa asks her.

 

“Lie beside me for a while.”

 

Sansa shakes her head and her beautiful hair moves with it.

 

“You rest. I will visit the nursery while you sleep.”

 

“Make peace with him.”

 

But, the words fall on an empty and darkening room.

 

* * *

 

 

When he holds her she does not twist in his grip, she allows his kiss and his ardor for moments longer than he’d expected.

 

When she distances him with a hand he steps back and raises his chin. “You can take your tea after,” he tells her.

 

Her face is some stone visage for all it allows him to see of her true thoughts.

 

“I intended to.”

 

“I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. It never mattered.”

 

She does strike him, the only time she has ever done so, and he only stands before her woodenly.

 

“You lied,” she accuses.

 

“I didn’t know.”

 

“I do not believe you.”

 

“I thought one day you would stop drinking it and have my son and you would have something of your own to love.”

 

“Do not repeat such a stupid thing aloud, the thing you told yourself to make it easier to climb upon me and do your duty and feel like you were doing me some great honor.”

 

He has no words left.

 

She is pleased to have hurt him with her own.

* * *

 

 

Daenerys leaves.

 

But he has stubbornly stayed.

* * *

 

 

He shelters his own passions, the warm lust stoked for a few nights away from both their beds.

 

There is much to imagine with some shadow of shame, he knows why and perhaps the how of things but keeps to the training yard, the flights atop Rhaegal, the quietude of the godswood that overlooks the sea.

 

He thinks on them before sleep for all the nights that cover him before a candle pushes back the shadows of his chambers like a thin shroud.

 

His once-sister asks if she might sleep beside him and he is wary of her the way he always should have been.

 

She places the small weight of her breast in his hand and presses a cheek to his, a saw in her breath and the drum of her heart heavy on his scarred palm.

 

He might see some of her own scars in the waving light of the candle, through the thinness of her night rail, a gossamer thing of stars, made for her for their wedding night and never worn again.

 

She touches where his unhealing death was carved into him too deeply to have forgotten and softly slips the knots from the stays that sit her pale shoulders. The old silver and pink of where she’s been cut raises across the expanse of her flesh do not dissuade him, she presses his fingers to them until an ache begins so he might know how well he might touch her before she will turn from his hands.

 

His mouth takes the taste of his fingertips and he watches in sleepless rapt wonder as she bows her head to take them inside her mouth. He grunts, shifting, stirring below where once she had a soft seat.

 

From the fall of her hair she looks up as though through fire and releases him from his yearning for a spare moment when he might lean close to kiss her softly and remember the taste of her mouth.

 

His hand in hers turned slave and soldier and she guides it between the warmth of them, below the pale glow of her night rail and the trundle of bed clothes about them, he makes a seat for her upon his palm.

 

She presses her brow to his throat as he finds the slick line on her between parting lips, split by his slowly questing fingers. He is less deft than she at her harp but he is well-practiced in this, he holds her by the nape and she sighs, slotting the cradle of her hips closer into his own.

 

He touches her from behind, and folds her over him as he reclines more deeply into an abundance of feather and down.

 

She pitches and saws against where he strains, her body eases and her slick is abundant upon his hand as he delves her with easily unseated fingertips, the way of her encircles his own with a give and an embrace so gently felt he marvels at the nature of what might so easily steal a man’s will for war or violence or dishonor.

 

He knows she wishes for less than the full measure of him, the tide of her gentle tilting has become a movement and motion of heaviness and weeping slickness upon his sword hand and his thigh and his cock, it is something made of mess and magic by the light of one melting taper.

 

She is as soft and wet as melting wax, the tender parts of her malleable as that warm candle, he has been in that place before but it has never felt so triumphant as this, as lovely and terribly mollifying as she is silent and readying herself for some long durance of time in his bed and upon his body.

 

She gifts him her huffing kiss, half-breathless for want of something kind and good and a peak he might help her reach.

 

Her nails drag lightly through his hair and her breast press sweetly against his chest, his cock a sticky brand above her mound, he bleeds out a sound in concert to her own. He ceases in his gentle petting to fall deeper still to the bed, she follows and her hair falls around them.

 

The rough maleness of him folds tight to his belly and she cradles his side, shoulder between her breasts hip cresting between the pillows of her thighs, she places his hand upon her night-rail and he pulls it up over her thighs, the red thatch of her vibrant sex a bright vision of fire.

 

The dampness of her curls on his skin is a heady thing. He runs a hand across himself, a display meant to present he thinks upon reflection, her eyes follow it and look, gleaning instruction from his hand upon his own member.

 

She folds a hand between her thighs and lingers in stillness before she might twist, half away.

 

Angled from him with a head pillowed above his knee she present him the sight of her parted thighs and the beauty of her cunt.

 

The spill of her unbound hair falls between his legs and knees and she moves deft fingers down, opening her folds, putting a fingertip to the nubbin he might put lips to if she would let him sup on her some future night.

 

He languishes through a stroke, her eyes are dark and she feels the clench of herself with one long finger, the sounds scant until the filthy slap of his fist upon his cock precedes the wet smack of her stretched open around two fingers.

 

She looks half-wary, testing, waiting for something.

 

He touches upon her wrist and offers again his roughed callous worn hand, without softness but not lack of care for her. Her fingers latch about his wrist wetly and feed one of his own inside of herself before they leave his hand completely to twine in her own hair and graze knuckles along his clenching thigh.

 

He strokes himself to the sight of her cunt, fucked by his fingers, slowly with such rapt attention that his eyes have fallen shut and her breasts tip towards the canopy above a bowing back.

 

In the hour of the wolf the night seems endless and inhabited only by the sounds they make, the salt of their sweat, and the color of her eyes.

* * *

 

 

“What do you want?” he asks against her skin.

 

She does not need a moment to think before she answers him.

 

“Leave and do not return here.”

 

He shakes his head, hands open and arms falling in supplication as he moves to sit, furs pooled in his naked lap, and looks in the very stern way of her father that he has come upon some final decision.

 

“I cannot promise that.”

 

She sighs, arranging her hair. “When you went South you were never able to keep the ones you would make to me.”

 

She’s not wrong.

 

He falls back to the bed and watches her dress in silent ardor.

 

* * *

 

 

The fortnight seems to last an entire forgotten winter.

 

He has yet to saddle his horse and return to his throne.

 

He denies her peace and comes into her chamber without invitation.

 

She allows him some measure of comfort once more because he might look upon her naked skin and not shy from the ruin of it.

 

“You would take everything from me,” she mutters, displeased as he remains at her back, lips pressed to her damp skin. “My name and my home, my banners,” she goes on.

 

“All the same of mine is yours,” he tells, pleading with some true piece of himself, as if she might be happy to have any of what is his.

 

She drags her nails gently across the arm heavy across the hip.

 

“I do not wish to be your wife, I do not wish to bear children for you,” she tells him, moving to her elbow and rising upon it.

 

She looks askance at him. “If I must leave East and take up the Dreadfort as my pension I will, if you would persist on remaining here.”

 

He knows what she wants.

 

The furs have fallen from her perfect breasts.

 

“Did you mean to seduce me in this?” he asks, looking up from them, not upset, not anything other than curious.

 

“Yes.”

 

He nods, leaving her bed to retrieve the garments she has pulled him from with her own hands from the rushes where they have been tossed. “You moved like you could feel me, like you wanted me, was that some lie you played upon me?”

 

She does not move to rise.

 

“You think that you are better than the rest but you are just a man and I am not the wife you chose.”

 

“You are my _wife_.”

 

She smiles, but it is a thing devoid of warmth. “You’re a king here but I’m still a Stark.”

 

And, he’s no longer that.

 

“I won’t leave,” he tells her. “Not like this.” He shakes his head.

 

She turns to stretches across the empty space he has made. “Very well.”

 

He scowls, stomps into his second boot and turns to press hand to the bed and push his face close to hers once more. “I will not let you run from me when I have given no cause for it.”

 

She blinks.

 

“Am I a prisoner then?” she asks.

 

He is shamed suddenly and she knows that much from his naked face.

 

“Go South,” she says. “Raise your heir, fuck your true queen, and leave me to keep the Northern peace.”

 

* * *

 

 

Daenerys asks him upon his return what has happened, his moods have blackened to something corpse rotten on his way back to the Red Keep.

 

“She will no longer be kept by promises I cannot hold to.”

 

Daenerys sighs and continues with her attempts to dress their child. “Annul it, if that would please her and mend the rift between you.”

 

“What?”

 

She lifts a shoulder and her gown waves along the length of her. “There’s been no issue. No one might say for sure if it were ever consummated at all.”

 

* * *

 

 

His honor is a tarnished thing.

 

He agrees.

 

He presses his seal beside his scrawl.

 

He finishes it.

 

His son beckons him from around the edge of his solar’s open door.

 

* * *

 

 

He is losing.

 

“Your sister plays well you know.” He’s told by his wife as she moves a cyvasse piece across the board to ravage his meager forces.

 

“I do not doubt it,” he mutters.

 

Daenerys’ eyes rise, “You however do not,” she says pointedly.

 

“Are you mad with me?” he asks.

 

“No, she wins more than you do, too.”

 

“I wondered if you loved her.”

 

“I do, still. Though, it’s not an easy thing.”

 

Her eyes catch his and her smile, though small, is a warm.

 

“Why?”

 

Instead of a true answer she only topples his piecemeal kingdom across the board. “It is a solace to her to wound you, she does not want to think she needs you.”

 

She has pinned him.

 

Daenerys smiles. “She can do nothing about what was done to her except hate it.”

 

“Some of that I did to her,” he admits.

 

“Most of it was done by others long before you ever called her wife.”

 

It does not bring him peace to think he has not been the only one to wrong her.

**Author's Note:**

> There doesn't have to be such a sad ending to this but fuck if I know how to write a happy one for everyone. Someone write me a sequel while I languish in my giant back log of other fic I need to be finishing o_o


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